


Black Celebration

by JinxedSydney



Series: Admit it to Everyone Else [2]
Category: The Punisher (TV 2017)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-04
Updated: 2018-08-04
Packaged: 2019-06-21 18:43:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,617
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15564093
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JinxedSydney/pseuds/JinxedSydney
Summary: Logic and reason clawed at her throat, frantic. “I did something horrible.”





	Black Celebration

**Author's Note:**

> "To celebrate the fact,  
> That we've seen the back,  
> Of another black day."

Karen had given Frank the spare key when he left the first night. And he’d refused. She held it up, pinched between her fingers, until his dark eyes nearly crossed.

“I’d rather not explain to the neighbors why a man is picking my lock.”

His smile shoved sideways as he tucked it into his jeans.

She was too busy with work to count the days (nine long ones) until the evening the deadbolt slid back while she dropped some pasta into a pot of boiling water. Frank rapped his knuckles on the door as he inched it open.

“Ma’am?”

“Hey, stranger.” She shook more noodles into the water, hoping the hair draping around her face would cover the grin she struggled to control.

So began the unconventional, unlabeled “thing.” Frank would arrive on a random evening and bring dessert or beer or coffee, or sometimes all three. Karen would cook dinner or order in. She would dish up the meal, he’d wash the plates. They’d watch an old movie, from The Outsiders to The Maltese Falcon. He’d hesitate at the doorway each time he left, reminding her to lock it. She’d lean her forehead against the wood once the deadbolt thudded into the jamb, straining to hear his boots.

She was far too occupied to keep track of his visits (the fifth one), when he surprised her with big band tunes from his phone, while the dishes clinked against one another in the sink. She smiled and kept working on her article from the couch, sneaking several peeks to see if the Punisher would lip sync or sway.

Frank turned and noticed her. His chin tipped up, water dripping from his fingers. “Pops used to play them at his shop.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

Karen knew better than to ask, and she looked at her article again. She gave him breadth, as opposed to dealing with resolute silence when she pushed.

“You want a beer?”

She read the sentence she’d just finished and squinted. “Ah, no. I need to keep a straight head on to finish this up. Ellison wants it before midnight.” The words on the screen weren’t cooperating, so she scrubbed her scalp with both hands and let her eyes drift close.

Frank opened and closed a few cupboards across the room. “Hrm.”

Cracking one eye open at first, both of them popped equally wide when Karen saw what he held. She’d forgotten all about that, shoved into a cupboard and buried, to deal with later—and the day had arrived.

Frank swirled the whisky inside the bottle. His eyebrow hiked, matching his tipped grin. “Been holding out on me?”

“But you won't be the first to die, Miss Page. No, I think Mr. Urich will have that honor, then we'll go to your place of employment, see to Mr. Nelson, Mr. Murdock. After that your friends, family, everyone you've ever cared about and when you have no tears left to shed then, then we'll come for you, Miss Page.”

She tried to tamp down the nervous flinch in her smile. “Have at it.” And as if to reassure herself that James Wesley would not come through the doorway, Karen turned and glanced at her purse near the front door.

He tracked her eyes and eased the bottle to the countertop. “What’s going on, Karen?”

“Nothing.” It was too sudden, her voice too pitched, and she wanted to take everything back. Her hands trembled above the keyboard. She pushed the hair behind her ears and chose to smile.

Frank lumbered toward the couch. “You don’t have ta tell me, but it’s got me wondering why you’re eyeballin’ the gun in your purse.”

A lie slid into Karen’s thoughts, but she bit it back. They were honest with one another. She looked at her murderous hands. Her jaw worked back and forth until she closed the laptop and set it on the coffee table. Elbows to her knees, she leaned into both hands.

The couch dipped when Frank sat and turned on the television, fiddling with the remote. And when the music started, Karen retreated further into her entangled thoughts. She knew the movie because it was her favorite. And he knew it, too.

“Remember, remember  
The fifth of November,  
The gunpowder treason and plot…”

Sometime after the Old Bailey was annihilated, Frank’s fingers brushed Karen’s bare shoulder. Innocuous, as if he wanted her to remember he was there (as if she’d forget). She pried her face from her hands and looked to the masked figure on the screen.

“I …” Karen’s confession slithered behind her ribcage, desperate to escape. Maybe it’d stop the nightmares. Because if it wasn’t Frank’s body jerking in a hail of bullets, or Matt waving seconds before a building collapsed, it was Wilson Fisk’s chunky fingers flexed across her windpipe.

Frank lowered the volume. He hunched forward on the couch. She could see him looking at her from the corner of her eye. “You know you can tell me.”

“I know,” she snapped. “I’m sorry.” Her stomach flopped and she cleared her throat from some sudden, invisible irritation. “How… how do you bury something so deep that you don’t feel it anymore?”

“Ma’am?”

“I did something, a long time ago, and it sneaks back in.” She bit the corner of her thumb and curled her toes into the rug.

For a moment, Karen thought that he hadn’t heard her, until he exhaled. “Okay.” 

V gave the doctor a Scarlet Carson rose onscreen when Karen finally looked to the ceiling. Logic and reason clawed at her throat, frantic. “I did something horrible.”

Frank’s movements stilled altogether.

“I’ll tell you why I looked at my gun. Because I’m not the person you think I am.”

She lowered her gaze to his calloused hands, perched on his knees. The denim was worn and looked soft. She might have thought Frank was a monster a long time ago, but he waited for her to speak.

“What’s the saying—just rip the band-aid off?” Her weak laugh sounded hollow.

“You don’t have to say nothin’.” His sandpapered contradiction was barely more than a whisper.

“I killed someone, Frank.”

She heard his shortened breath before he grabbed both of her hands. “Okay.”

And as hard as she tried to stare at his rough knuckles, Karen flicked her eyes up. He leaned his forehead into hers.

“I ain’t gonna judge you for a life, Karen. It’s not my place. Whoever it was needed to stay down. You wouldn’t just go doin’ that.”

She hiccuped a sob and slid her face into his shoulder. He held her there, one hand on her neck, the other clutching her hands.

“I was so angry,” she whimpered into his flannel. “I should’ve stopped, but I kept pulling the trigger until it was empty.”

Frank’s hand left Karen’s and cradled her face until she pulled away from his body.

For a second, a minute, a week, a lifetime, their eyes roamed each other’s face. If anything, she saw the sorrow in his blown pupils as they glanced to her eyes, hair, lips. Something lower, much lower than the panic behind her ribs ignited and she blurted out her hidden thoughts.

“I need you to kiss me,” Karen breathed. “Or get me drunk because I don’t want the nightmares tonight.”

He swiped his thumb across her chin, eyes bouncing back and forth between her own. When he sharply inhaled, Karen silently begged him to grant her first request, but knew it was futile. He pushed himself up. Her fat, hot tears plopped onto his empty spot when she heard the bottle slide from the countertop. The metal lid ground against the glass on its way off, just before Frank sat it next to her laptop.

Karen straightened and shook her hair loose, ashamed for loosening her secret. She sniffed hard and nodded to the bottle. “What? No glasses?”

“Not needed.” He grabbed the bottle and resumed his spot on the couch. He watched her, without blinking, and raised the neck to his lips. She felt stripped to the bone when he tipped the liquid into his mouth, still staring at her.

She tried to avoid his fingers when he passed the bottle to her, but they touched, regardless—the fire behind her belly button flaring out in all directions. The bottle hurried to her lips and she closed her eyes when her head slanted back. She pretended that she could still taste his lips on the rim. Putting both hands on the bottle to steady herself, she gulped a mouthful, willing the flaming whisky to burn her into oblivion rather than have Frank remember what she said.

When Karen pulled a second slug into her mouth, the bottle was torn away. Liquor dribbled down her chin. She wiped it away with the back of her hand, then picked at her nail polish as Frank screwed the lid back on.

“Aw come on,” she said, reaching for the bottle when he went to put it on the coffee table. Nothing to lose anymore, she plowed ahead. He was probably pissed off anyway. “Takes more than a couple of sips of whisky to get me drunk, Frank.”

He set the bottle on the floor, well out of her reach.

She was already looking at him when he glanced to her. “Let me guess. This falls under the ‘it’s not you, it’s me’ category?”

“It ain’t that.”

“Then give me the damn bottle.”

“I still love my wife.”

“I know that!” Her voice—no, her frustration unleashed. Ripping off the band-aid be damned. “Everyone knows that! Do you really think I’m that shallow? That I’d think you’d ever forget your wife? Your children?”

Frank glared, the former sympathy hardening around the corners of his eyes, nostrils flaring wide. His nose fractionally scrunched. The muscles at his jaw line flexed, pushing up the wiry hairs of his beard, as he kept back his answer.

Karen heard it though—his shock that she would dare to throw his family into the fray. Her humiliation smothered everything. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” she whispered. She rose, twisting to flee to her bedroom.

He caught her wrist. She faced the kitchen, tears spilling over again, but refused to turn.

“Who was it?” Frank’s voice was controlled, but she heard the fight in his tone.

And she knew he was trying, that he heard her revelation and accusation. After all, he was Frank Castle, a good and honorable man. The one who’d saved her life. Held a gun to her head when she’d begged him to. She stepped backwards, relenting to the pressure on her wrist, until the warm cushion settled underneath her again. But he held on, thumb against the blue veins under her skin. He was trying.

“Um, James Weasley.” Because if she couldn’t tell him, who could she tell? Foggy would never look at her the same way. And had Matt known … “He, uh, worked for Fisk.” The whisky teased her from the carpet.

Frank’s grip squeezed then relaxed.

“He put the gun on the table between us and told me it wasn’t loaded. And when he stood up, I shot him.” The desperation for the whisky hung on her tongue, heavier than the words. “Then, I kept pulling the trigger because he said he would kill everyone else before me.”

A calloused thumb scraped skin so sensitive, that Karen’s eyes jerked to watch it trace a lazy circle.

“I … I wiped off the table, so there wouldn’t be any fingerprints. I threw the gun into the river. Came home, drank from that bottle, and have never been the same.” Her voice slid into silence, as the violence raged on the television, mirroring her mind. “No one knew. I’m not the God-damned saint that everyone thinks I am, who they have to protect.”

James Wesley’s demon of silence thrashed thoughts of repulsion and doubt. Frank crushed his thumb into her wrist. She looked at their connection and didn’t flinch, grateful for the pain to suffocate any other feelings she harbored for the Punisher. A bruise was of little consequence.

“Then there are the others I killed without a gun,” Karen plowed ahead, a shaky breath pulling her from any false sense of normality. “Like Ben Ulrich.”

“Stop.”

Her head hauled up at his single word, and he was already watching her, waiting for her eyes to catch up to his.

“You took care of it when you had to. No need to be shouldering the weight of another.” Frank pressed his thumb even harder before releasing altogether. He looked down and his shoulders sagged, as if the weight of the world had landed on them, when he moved his thumb and saw the blood rushing back to the white spot. “You … you go find trouble. And sometimes trouble finds you. But I got your back now. I know you can take care of yourself, I’ve heard you say it.”

Karen swallowed her laugh, but it rushed through her nose in a hurried breath. She shook her head and looked as Evie pressed her lips to V’s mask (If only).

“It doesn’t mean that I don’t want you safe, Karen. And I ain’t gonna argue about it again.”

Suddenly, she was thrust back to the river near the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge in her mind, and he was furious, seething at her for doing her job. But when she looked across the sofa, he was shaking his head and she could feel his palm around her tender wrist.

“Okay,” she said.

Frank heaved a sigh, nodding to their knees before looking up. “Okay.”

Karen chuckled. “I think that is our code word.”

“Yeah?”

“And there’s our other one.” Her grin crept until her teeth showed.

He laughed and it chased away her demons for a heartbeat. Reaching for the whisky, he rolled the bottle between his hands. She could see him wrestle it, that unnamed “thing,” his own war, that pulled them together like anxious magnets—and pushed them away all the same.

“No glasses.” She pressed her hand against his, the ache in her wrist reminding her that he wouldn’t forget her craving. First, she’d called him “honey” and assumed they’d be together each morning (her after, with him). And now this confession, laid bare. He may have been silent, but he was not ignorant. After all, he was Frank Castle, a man who walked into a building, always knowing a way out.

Frank removed the lid and lifted the bottle to his lips, eyes fastened to hers. And it’s all Karen could do to not stare and burn inside and shove down the snippets of dreams she still guarded. Her heart stuttered when he glanced to her lips as he dragged a gulp from the bottle.

Karen followed suit, once he’d handed the whisky over, their fingers more than brushing.  
“To whisky, for chasing the nightmares away,” she offered. “To staying safe.”

He didn’t answer. She didn’t want him to. Because they both knew—that “thing.” And it nudged them when the movie ended, and he caught her by the elbow because she lost her balance getting up from the couch. It prodded as he shrugged on his jacket and she picked up his hat after it fell out of the pocket. It stirred when Frank reminded her to lock the door, and Karen listened to his footsteps fade.

Her phone buzzed inside her pocket.

Pete: goodnight

That “thing.” 

Karen slipped to her window and carefully pulled the blinds to look into the street. Frank waited, far longer than the Punisher would have, watching her watch him, and then disappeared into the shadows.

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by Depeche Mode's "Black Celebration." And heaven help me, these song-titled chapters keep spawning themselves.


End file.
